Congress constitutes 5 screening committees for shortlisting candidates for Lok Sabha polls

New Delhi: Preparing for the Lok Sabha elections, Congress on Friday night announced five screening committees for recommending party candidates for Lok Sabha elections, days after setting up its manifesto committee.

The party also appointed Congress Working Committee Special Invitee Alka Lamba as Mahila Congress president in place of Netta D'Souza and Varun Chaudhary as NSU(I) President in place of Neeraj Kundan.

The decision to set up the screening committee at the earliest was taken at a meeting of the Congress Working Committee on December 21 last year. Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge also told a meeting of party leaders on Thursday that the panels will be announced soon.

The party has grouped states and union territories in five clusters. Karnataka is part of cluster-1 along with Telangana, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Lakshadweep and Puducherry with Harish Chaudhary chairing the Screening committee with Viswajeet Kadam and Jignesh Mewani as members.

Madhusudhan Mistry will head the Cluster-II states Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Goa, Odisha and Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Suraj Hegde and Shafi Parambil will be members of the Cluster-II Screening Committee.

The Cluster-III states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Delhi, Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli will be headed by Rajani Patil with Krishna Allavaru and Pargat Singh as members.

Bhakta Charan Das will head the Cluster-IV Screening Committee with Neeraj Dangi and Yashomati Thakur as members to recommend candidates for Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Chandigarh, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.

Cluster-V states of Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Assam and north-east states will have Rana KP Singh heading the screening committee with Jaivardhan Singh and Ivan D'Souza as members.

Three of the five screening committee heads -- Chaudhary, Das and Patil -- were dropped during the recent reshuffle of General Secretaries and state in-charges but are given new assignments keeping in mind their potential and seniority, sources said.